Tech Shout!

A program has been developed in Vienna, which mimics human musicians like Bach, Beethoven and Mozart, so convincingly that a casual listener to Classic FM would be unable to tell the difference. The program allows notes (1.5 million different sounds) to be combined in new ways, so that composers can make new music on their laptop without needing to hire an entire orchestra.

The software from the Vienna Symphonic Library (VSL) has been bought by around 10,000 people all over the world, including students, musicians seeking their big break and composers for television and films. This is because the money-saving potential is huge.

This software was used extensively for the soundtrack of the Hollywood vampire film, Underworld. Each note is the product of years of painstaking recording sessions by leading Austrian musicians in a soundproof studio. They attempted to set down the full range of ‘perfect’ single notes from around 100 instruments - more continue to be added - which were then digitally stored in the most extensive musical database of its kind. They are made available to composers - packages range from £500 to £6,000 - who can put selected notes together to create an entire symphony on their PC.

The idea came about when Herb Tucmandl, a former cellist in the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, became frustrated by a lack of funds for trying out his ideas when composing music for films. There were already pre-recorded sample libraries - digitised single sounds as well as sequences of tones - available, but only on a few CD-Roms with limited range.He found a financial backer for his dream of a vast library of samples which could match a human orchestra.

Tucmandl hired more than 100 musicians who devoted up to a year of their lives to the recording project, sometimes under huge mental and physical strain. For the sake of consistency, all the samples had to be played by the same musician on the same instrument.

‘I needed better tools to make music and it was not possible to fake an orchestra at that time,’ said Tucmandl, who started the VSL in 2000. ‘One instrument alone can take more than a year to record. There are many parameters - the loudness, the connection between two notes, the different playing styles.

Tucmandl does not claim that the VSL is identical to the sound of a human orchestra playing together at one time. ‘A human professional musician is of course faster than our sounds,’ he said. ‘We have 1.5 million samples, but real musicians have more. I don’t think we’ll ever get them all.’
And he denied that he is setting out to supplant humans. ‘I don’t think orchestras are threatened. In the TV industry, for example, we don’t have the budgets for orchestras anyway. And there are still live performances: nobody goes to a concert to listen to a computer.’